Does it bother you he puts himself on the same level as Tolkien?

It bothers me because he hasn't backed it up. I know fantasy isn't exactly high literature, but LOTR is far and away a better literary work than ASOIAF. This is probably because Tolkien had a very strong, well-rooted philosophic perspective, while Martin is just a pop writer who latches on to the things that excite and arouse him.

Tolkien's prose, especially evident in Silmarrilion is aesthetically pleasing and comes from a place of sincerity and love of his fellow men. Martin is an atheist hack that was bullied in high school and wants to politicise and degrade any transcendent values in fantasy literature, his prose is dogshit, his characters are laughably simple and ideologically perverse. A shell of a writer.

t. christcuck

Accept Jesus and repent.

yeah, hes way better than tolkien

One thing here I believe to be totally true: that Tolkien is sincere and Martin is not. There's a degree to which Tolkien is a trustworthy figure, as a narrator and world-builder, whereas with Martin you can't stop wondering whether or not he's about to trick you.

Martin is nothing compared to Terry Goodkind

"Hissing, hackles lifting, the chicken’s head rose. Kahlan pulled back. Its claws digging into stiff dead flesh, the chicken slowly turned to face her. It cocked its head, making its comb flop, its wattles sway. “Shoo,” Kahlan heard herself whisper. There wasn’t enough light, and besides, the side of its beak was covered with gore, so she couldn’t tell if it had the dark spot, But she didn’t need to see it. “Dear spirits, help me,” she prayed under her breath. The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People’s chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest."
-Soul of the Fire

>Does it bother you he puts himself on the same level as Tolkien?
The same level as in he should be put six feet under like Tolkien.

I certainly don't think he is better than Tolkien, buy ASOIAF are really good books and among the best fantasy novels of all time imo.

*but

Characters don't actually die that often in the books.

Maybe not as much as I embellished, but you cannot deny that he gained a lot of notoriety because of it.

"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing."
—J.R.R. Tolkien

Sure, but that's not why he did it. It's not about shock value because he always provides proper resolution for his characters' arcs.

Maybe Jon dying at the end of ADWD is the one exception, but depending on what he does (if TWOW is ever done) with that it could be excused.

There's twenty years' worth of fantasy readers pissed off at him for botching an incredibly promising series.

...

>transcendent values in fantastic literature
My sides

And gurm's characters are more complex then Tolkien's

>ideologically perverse
>WAH STOP THINKING THINGS I DON'T THINK

Only because he killed the "main character" in the first book.

Because of the TV series. It's popular so it must be bad. Also something something normies.

And where do you think that comes from? Grrm is insecure and base, and so is his tr at mention of his world and characters.

Tolkien is to creative literary genius what Martin is to hack pulp idiocy. They both so far surpass anyone else in their field that they will be remembered 1,000 years from now as a kind of yin and yang of fantasy, a Manichaen duality of speculative letters. For every sublime, luminous beauty that Tolkien has gifted the world, Martin has cursed us with a tedious, banal ugliness. It is unfair to compare the two directly on any one point, because Martin is in every way the anti-Tolkien, patently sterile, parasitical, and inferior, but so much so that he becomes a monument in his own right, and counterbalances Tolkien. Could one exist without the other? Tolkien obviously could. But it is only by the contrast that Martin offers that we can truly appreciate the full depths and heights of Tolkien. Our understanding of Tolkien would be incomplete if Martin had never set pen to page. It is through only the abject failure and futility of Martin that we can approach an apprehension of the true scope and scale of Tolkien's hitherto inconceivable greatness. Perhaps this is what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote about the Music of the Ainur. If Tolkien is a subcreator in the image of Eru, truly Martin is like unto Melkor. It is only reflected in the awfulness of the one that we can fully see the goodness of the other.

Isn't GRRM more like Robert E Howard?

I think GRRM's stories are better but Tolkien is and should always be seen as the more influencial and pivotal writer.

>Tolkien is to creative literary genius what Martin is to hack pulp idiocy. They both so far surpass anyone else in their field
6/10 almost made me laugh

Martin wishes he were a tenth the writer Howard is. REH is arguably even greater than Tolkien, at least as far as writerly skill is concerned.

Anyone is allowed to disagree with or criticize Tolkein. It doesn't mean you're putting yourself on his level as a writer or a historical figure.

No. He's a literal neck-beard. I bet he paints D&D figurines.

Also, his work could not have existed without Tolkien. So, there's that bit of irony for ya.

He's so far below Tolkien, if Tolkien took a shit, it would hit Martin like an asteroid reaching the Earth. That you don't know this speaks levels to your plebery.

I know this is pasta, and even the person who wrote it was probably being ironic, but it's actually right and true, ironically.

Normie tier literature
>Book not finished yet
>First 3 are brilliant
>Next 2 are turgid crap that needs an editor badly
>Written himself into a corner
>The Jews at HBO have no mercy they will run his legacy into the ground
>This season of GOT is already complete trash

>mfw all the assmad leftists in this thread

wholesome, traditional christian values really get you enraged, huh? I love it

Holy shit, not reading all that garbage

If he actually does then yeah, that would bother me a lot. For one thing, Tolkien is a far superior writer on a purely technical level. His command of mood, his ability to insinuate massive amounts of information from small details, his skill with geographical descriptions (they're some of the best in modern English literature, up there with Patrick Leigh Fermor), and his ease within a formal register all make him the better author. How much history and mythology has GRRM actually read? His attempts at grandiosity are incredibly awkward and seem cribbed from pop culture rather than ancient stories and historical documents. Clearly his idea of an epic is Star Wars, not Beowulf.

And Tolkien was actually capable of finishing a story. He had a clear aesthetic and narrative vision and kept to it. He wasn't making it up as he went along; there was a coherent structure that perfectly complimented the actions described within the text. There was a lifetime of craftsmanship present at every level from narrative to style to background detail. The languages Tolkien invented were really languages. They were ordered, they had grammars, they could be learned and spoken. They weren't nonsense words that somebody spluttered into a word processor

GRRM is a screenwriter. His books aren't literature, they're television episodes waiting to be filmed

>petty-bourgeois "we have to protect our tiny communities and I totally know what rural farmers live like despite not being a farmer myself" ideology
>traditional christian values

Not the same thing.

right

I agree. Writers have lost sight of the aural and mythic traditions

Martin's 'realistic' depiction of medieval life and economics is extremely shallow. It never goes beyond the obvious and simply implying that some of these subjects exists.